Witnesses Confirm Missile Took Down TWA 800

by J. Orlin Grabbe

An article from the New York Post (reproduced below) cites FBI
interviews with 154 credible witnesses that a missile took down TWA Flight
800.

In my original post on the subject, "The Downing of TWA Flight
800," on July 23, I said the normal procedure for personnel who have
received intelligence training (in this case Syria-trained terrorists)
would have been to fire the missile from a small boat off shore. In
subsequent posts, "Bill Clinton's Choo-Choo" and "The Phosphorus-Headed
Missile and TWA Flight 800", I clarified that the missile was targeted at
the center, or belly, fuel tank. A couple of months later, the Post now
comes belatedly comes to the same conclusion:

"Law-enforcement sources said the hardest evidence
gathered so far overwhelmingly suggests a surface-to-air
missile -- with the sophisticated ability to lock on the
center of a target rather than its red-hot engines -- was
fired from a boat off the Long Island coast to bring down
the airliner July 17."

Only two details are lacking for the Post to have the entire
story. First, they need to disregard the FBI's falsified figure of
13,700 for the altitude at which the plane was hit (the real number is
about 7,600 feet). Secondly, they need to figure out it was the forward
end, or head, of the missile that was glowing. As noted in a New York
Times article about one of the missile photographs, "It is in a roughly
horizontal position, although its left end is tilted downward. Its right
end seems to be brightly lighted." ("Is that a Missile? Snapshot on Night
of Air Crash Turns Hot," New York Times, August 26, 1996).

And why was the elevated end, or head, of the missile glowing?
As I previously reported, the ordinary head of the Stinger had been replaced
with two small attachments--the first one containing a different guidance
system that allowed the missile to lock-in on the center fuel tank, the
second one being a phosphorus head that was designed to blow up fuel tanks
in a violently effective manner.

More than 150 "credible" witnesses -- including several scientists --
have told the FBI and military experts they saw a missile destroy TWA
Flight 800, The Post has learned.

Sources provided startling new details from the frustrating two-month
probe -- persuading agents to acknowledge that the witnesses' accounts
point toward a missile:

The FBI interviewed 154 "credible" witnesses -- including scientists,
schoolteachers, Army personnel and business executives -- who
described seeing a missile heading through the sky just before Flight
TWA 800 exploded.

"Some of these people are extremely, extremely credible," a top
federal official said.

Sources said the witnesses lived or were vacationing along Long
Island's South Shore in Nassau and Suffolk counties when they saw the
object heading toward the sky.

"When we asked what they saw and where they saw it, the witnesses out
east pointed to the west, and the people to the west pointed to the
east ," one source said.

FBI technicians mapped the various paths -- points in the sky where
the witnesses said they saw the rising "flare-like" object -- and
determined that the "triangulated" convergence point was virtually
where the jumbo jet initially exploded.

Struck by the number and confidence of the witnesses, the FBI sat down
many of the witnesses with U.S. military experts, who debriefed them
and independently confirmed for the FBI that their descriptions
matched surface-to-air missile attacks.

"The military experts told us that what the witnesses were describing
was consistent with a missile," a federal official acknowledged. "They
told us, "You know what they are describing is a missile.' "

Law-enforcement sources said the hardest evidence gathered so far
overwhelmingly suggests a surface-to-air missile -- with the
sophisticated ability to lock on the center of a target rather than
its red-hot engines -- was fired from a boat off the Long Island coast
to bring down the airliner July 17.

That theory would have the attackers launching their missile from a
boat and fleeing north into Canada during the confusion immediately
after the explosion. Investigators are reviewing an anonymous threat
received after the Oct. 1, 1995, conviction of radical sheik Omar
Abdel Rahman, a law-enforcement source said.

The threat was that a New York area airport or jetliner would be
attacked in retaliation for the prosecution of the sheik, convicted of
plotting to blow up major New York City landmarks.

Investigators have been unable to find definitive evidence proving any
of their three key theories: missile, bomb planted in the plane or a
mechanical malfunction.

On Friday, the bomb theory took another tumble when the FBI revealed
the plane had carried explosives within a year of the crash as part of
a training exercise for drug-sniffing dogs.

That revelation could explain how traces of explosives were found on
wreckage of the downed Boeing 747.

The overriding obstacle for investigators probing the missile theory
has been the fact that Flight 800's engines show no signs of missile
damage.

But military experts told the FBI several modern heat-seeking
missiles -- in the hands of terrorists in Africa and available to
their Middle East counterparts -- target a plane's "central mass."

These missiles -- launched from a shoulder harness or a small pad --
different from the Stinger missiles that Afgani freedom fighters used
against the Russians -- are equipped with a super-sophisticated heat-
seeking device and are able to reach higher targets.

TWA 800 exploded at 13,700 feet -- the upper limit for the newest of
these portable-type missile systems.

Military experts pointed the FBI to man-portable missiles such as the
SA -14 Gremlin, SA-16 Gimlet and SA-18 Grouse -- equipped with
"proportional convergence logic" systems that are "sensitive enough to
home in on airframe radiation" once it nears its target, rather than
isolated hot spots.